From High Heels to Swathed Bodies: Gendered Meanings under Production in Mexico's Export-Processing Industry

Abstract

In recent decades, young, Third World women have eme as transnational capital's paradigmatic workers.Manager manifestos recast women's "natural" affinity for the home transferable set of skills and dispositions.These then cry lize into "docility" and "dexterity"-terms that go on to have tonomous effects as "labor force requirements" for assem workers internationally.'In this process, men have been r fined as nonworkers-lazy, demanding, and unreliable.T public narrative of home-grown sex differences provid backdrop to the constitution of localized gendered meanings export factories throughout the Third World.During the first decades of the boom in transnational prod tion, managers and feminists were in substantive agreem about the utility of young women's preconstituted "feminini for capitalist production, although their moral evaluation the process were markedly divergent.2However, in recent y poststructuralist feminist theorists of work have turned th attention to understanding the formation of "gendered c gories," rather than uncritically narrating history within thThis has enabled them to go beyond recounting the fat "woman workers" to investigate the processes through w the gendered character of labor power itself is established.cusing on public narratives, they have described the dep ment of images of the "exploitable woman worker" from n teenth-century France to the contemporary Third World.4Meanings are constituted and operate at many levels h ever, and public narratives are only one of them.The p structuralist focus on overarching categories has led to soph

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